bodies/words/sounds

FRIDAY, MAY 1st, 2009, 6 - 9PM




New Wilmington Art Association presents:
bodies/words/sounds
An evening of performance
Friday, May 1st, 2009, 6 - 9 pm.
Performances begin at 7 pm
Music begins at 8 pm

In 1969, when Vito Acconci found that poetry wasn’t enough, he began literally following people on the streets of New York in Following Piece. Sometimes art and ideas transcend the traditional static object and must be performed. bodies/words/sounds is an exhibition of ephemeral work that must be experienced live and will only exist again in the form of documentation. The exhibition breaks down the idea of performance in to three segments: bodies, words, and sounds. Bodies, refers to the use of the body as material in live performed art. React/dance, a modern dance team from Philadelphia will perform site-specific dance pieces live. Words, refers to the idea of the live interview as performance. Ahlen Moin will interview Heather Campbell Coyle, Associate Curator at the Delaware Art Museum, in a live performance titled My Salon. Sounds, refers to the live performance of music and the DJ. Kyle Tush (AKA DJ Squarewell) will perform Dubstep music live.

-Ron Longsdorf, Curator

React/dance

DJ SQUAREWELL

Electronics and Musical Images, 4-21-09

NOTE: ELECTRONICS AND MUSICAL IMAGES HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2009 @ 8PM.


Electronics and Musical Images

Audio-Visual Performance by Marianne Gythfeldt and Ashley John Pigford
RESCHEDULED FOR: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 , 8:00 PM Gore Recital Hall, Center for the Arts, University of Delaware, Newark, DE


Ashley Pigford (Department of Art) and Marianne Gythfeldt (Department of Music) come together to present new works for interactive electronics and multi-channel video in “Electronics and Musical Images”. This is the first in a series of collaborative performances by Pigford and Gythfeldt that unveils their development of audio-visual media and electro-acoustic music. The program will include new works by both artists, Eric Moe’s raucous On the Tip of my Tongue for Bass Clarinet and synthesizer, untamed improvisations with live electronics, and the premiere of a large-scale audio-visual work.

Cost: $12 adults; $8 seniors and $3 students Tickets available at the door on the night of the event.

Center for the Arts information:
http://primus.nss.udel.edu/buildings/displayBuilding.action?building.code=NW94

Google Maps Location:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Orchard+Road+%26+Kent+Way,+Newark,+New+Castle,+Delaware+19711&sll=39.679448,-75.75629&sspn=0.002791,0.017703&ie=UTF8&ll=39.681413,-75.75629&spn=0.006209,0.017703&z=16&iwloc=addr

Phengo Photography & Design LLC

April 3rd at 421 N Market Street

NWAA Presents: Brookes Britcher and Amanda Kamen

In his 1970 exhibition, Information, at the Museum of Modern Art, artist Joseph Kosuth proposed a new way to experience a work of art—by reading it. Kosuth and other artists aligned with conceptual or Story Art in the mid-1970s were using text as a narrative tool within their works. Brookes Britcher and Amanda Kamen find similar ways to include the nostalgic through the combination of text and image, recalling past emotional states or personal memories.

Britcher is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates pieces that investigate process, relationships, and emotional states. He describes his sculptures as “diaristic,” recording his responses to past events or feelings.1 Prior to his current body of work Brookes concentrated on photography, capturing images of discarded things. As his process and interest shifted into making, he retained that focus on found materials, and has accumulated objects for his pieces. That process of collecting is integral to his practice and Brookes likens the refiguring of the objects into his sculptures as therapeutic.2 Equally important is titling, and it is here that Brookes conveys those “archives of moments” that each work captures.3 This second layer of meaning provides a direction for the viewer but, as with Giving names to countertops (2008), the narrative if often cryptic and deeply personal, as if the viewer is allowed a brief glimpse into the artist’s thoughts. By exploring the past as source material for his work, Britcher documents that process of constructing memory.

Amanda Kamen’s journalistic drawings explore her personal experiences. She is a collector of sorts—accumulating old lists, journals, found words, images from clippings, past conversations, and remembered situations. These are the fodder for her work and she notes that her work “encourages a desire for understanding the human condition and the natural world.”4 Her process begins with this collecting and mark making, and progresses to small studies with the possibility of reaching a final, larger drawing. Kamen also has a love for animals and includes them with humorous quotes or imperatives, as in psst (moose) (2009). Like other figures in her drawings, the animals become peculiar characters, intent on eliciting a response from the viewer. These often quirky text and image combinations are a lighter approach to the conundrum of human existence.

Both Britcher and Kamen expose the personal through their work, as recordings of events past or those yet or never to come. Critics noted a sense of introspection as representative of the 1970s and one could argue that this mood is again present in Britcher’s and Kamen’s work. Like artists from the now almost invisible Story Art group in the mid-1970s, Britcher and Kamen focus on the direct sense of the personal—“the artist, his life, his thinking process, his sensations, desires and visions that are seen by the viewer.”5

—Margaret Winslow, Curator

1Brookes Britcher, Conversation with artist, March 26, 2009.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Amanda Kamen, Artist Statement, 2009.
5Paul Schimmel, ed., American Narrative/Story Art: 1967-1977 (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1977): 4.

Christy Marie

Self Portrait


Self Portrait



Christy Marie
Facebook: Christy Marie

Jim Zeske

Nomadic I, Installation view, details above, 2008